Price v Performance - is Upgrade worth it?

Hi there, been reading the DIY articles for the past few days as I've been really getting into editing over the past few weeks. This has lead to a few questions, I've read many other boards as well on the matter but never really touched on one thing, which I'll get to after this...

As a base, what I'm currently working with is the following (It was initially a gaming rig):

Choice 2 leaves me with a bit to be desired HD wise as I'd be stuck with the same setup but can always adjust this a few months later probably. Choice 1 I'll swap out the Raptor and set it aside and just use one of the other 500Gb for system/programs. I'll obviously be keeping the Case/PSU/GPU. I'm waiting to get Win7 (for sure)...and will OC the Q6600 if its better to stick with it.

I'm using Vegas 9 32bit at the moment - encoding right now is taking approx 8 min for a 30sec 720p @ 29fps clip (has lots of effects/video layers). So...would I see a big enough gain in encoding time with the upgrade to i7 or are we talking, once I get clips hitting the 5-10minute mark (I'm assuming it would take a few hours with the current setup), that encoding with the i7 will only drop a few minutes? making the price not justified. I'd be changing to the 64bit version of Vegas once I get Win7 as well.

Thoughts? Should, since I'm already running Quad, go cheap and just hold out for another generation of processors instead of bothering with the i7? Make the upgrade? I don't game anymore. And can see myself playing with video editing for quite a while down the road. I used to edit using Premier Pro 1.5 back a few years ago...should I consider looking into CS5 instead of using Vegas? Since I've been reading that CS5's Mercury Engine would probably make better use of my avail/upgraded hardware...or is this just a preferential thing?

I've looked at CPU charts...and at Stock the Q6600 gets smoked, by almost half...however, once its OC'd I think that margin will narrow quite a bit. I wouldn't see myself OC'ing the i7 as soon as I picked it up (I hate stressing BRAND new hardware)...

Based on my own personal testing, I'd have to agree. I had an i7-950, and it needed massive overclocking just to beat a stock i7-2600K in overall performance (even with my own relatively simple workflow). At equal performance, the 950's CPU temperatures almost hit 80°C while the 2600K stayed below 60°C. And at 4.7GHz my 2600K gets to roughly the same temperature as the 950 did at only 3.8GHz.

Hi I am glad you are going down the 2600k route as I am thinking the same think please help me you wrote previously on another treat;

Before you do this, you have to ask yourself the following questions:

1) Are you going to use a discrete hardware PCI-e RAID card in your new build?
2) If you answered "Yes" to 1), then are you going to use any additional PCI-e (not to be confused with PCI) cards at all?
If you answrerd "Yes" to both, then you'll need to purchase a more expensive motherboard (for example, the P8P67 Deluxe instead of the Pro) to even use all of the PCI-e cards that you're planning to use at all.

Please help I am thinking of the below core systems (two in total) to run my HD film editing (I mainly film weddings and parties). I am going to use windows 7 64 bit with Adrobe Premier CS5 (or possibly CS4) and photo Shop CS5;

I am going to be getting two of these systems build as i have heard that with even the best systems HD video takes time to process.
Do you think I need a raid system to handle the HD video or can manage with the above three drives?
Should I get another drive for the best configuration without a raid system?
If I do go for raid then what will be the speed increase when handling HD video? and what card would you recomend?

Should I go for a nvidia card to get the benefit of gpu acceleration? if so what card do you think?

The cameras that I use are two sony hvr-z7e i think the format is HDV???
sorry i am a newbie when it come to HD. I bought these cameras a year ago to get ready for HD but my customers were not ready and have only just started to show an interest now.

Hence i need to get ready.

Does the board that i have chosen have on board raid 0 twice? (to run the system you suggested 1 os drive and two raid 0's running two drives each) or will i have to get an additional raid pci-express card.

Actually HDV is High Def, 1440x1080, anamorphic 1.2:1. The video is compressed with an I-frame followed by 14 difference frames to make it fit into the same bandwidth as DV. This technique is similar to the compression technique used in encoding video for DVD, except it's on tape.

The bad part about HDV is any tape defect can result in the loss of up to 0.5 seconds of video. I also found that the video and audio get out sync after a dropout. You can correct it in post, but it's a real pain, and you can't cover the dropout unless you shoot with multiple cameras. Keep your heads clean.

Bottom line, though, is that you don't need RAID to edit HDV. Personally, I find it much easier to edit and get better quality using Cineform NeoHD to transcode the video to its continuous compression format. It does use more disc space for editing, but Premiere Pro is much more responsive. With my Core i7 machine, I get faster than realtime transcoding.

Thank you for your all your advise. I have decided to go for a simple three hard drive setup using the system already mentioned.

While researching how to get the footage of the camera, Originally i thought to get HDV tapes (10-15 per wedding) and then to buy a hdv vtr (HVR-M15AE about £1900) that I could use to transfer to pc. back ups would be the tapes.

But now I am thinking of buying fourteen 32gb CF cards costing £660(at x133) (two set of 7 per wedding) and using this method to transfer to pc (as will be four times quicker) and then to store the footage on external drive(s) with backups of these drives.

What do you think?? of the above method of working and storage. how long can i reuse the cf cards? using this method it will speed things up dramatically, i think, for me, though i will have to be diligent when storing the backups on hardrive after each wedding so as to reuse the cf cards.

When I bought my HDV camcorders, tape made sense, because there was no inexpensive archive media that could handle that much data. Tape seemed a cost-effective archive media.

Now flash memory and archiving to hard drives and Blu-Ray discs is probably the better choice. With tape, you have to transfer it to a computer, it's a sloiw, realtime process. Being able to plug a memory card into a computer is dramatically faster, and hard drives and BD-R prices have dropped.

Flash media is not permanent, but you can always reformat a card, if you have trouble.